


Their Little Girl

by 2babyturtles



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Australia, Devotion, F/M, Finding Hermione's Parents, Flash Fic, Gen, Love, Memory Charms, Short, Strength
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 21:36:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15058310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2babyturtles/pseuds/2babyturtles
Summary: When Hermione and Ron set out for Australia to find her parents, things become very real very fast.





	Their Little Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiwisaurus121](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwisaurus121/gifts).



It’s not that the sun was hotter than Hermione expected—she knew the Australian bushlands would be nightmarishly hot, particularly in comparison to her English home—but that the sun is harsher than she expected. She’d never been one to enjoy summer vacations where lounging in the sun was particularly important, but sunny days by the Black Lake had always been lovely and she thought she liked the warm glow of solar heat. Australia quickly challenged her opinion and she decided that she would never again complain about a rainy England day.

Of course, she was in a particularly foul mood when she decided this, and sweating through her tank tops didn’t help. She’d purchased a wide-brimmed hat for the trek across the desert, and even gone so far as to forge a driver’s license for Ron so he wouldn’t get in trouble if he were caught behind the wheel of the Jeep they’d enchanted. However, her freckled shoulders and rosy pink nose had quickly turned to blistered shoulders and a lobster-red nose. She was irritated.

“Why does this have to be so bloody difficult?” she demanded, not for the first time.

Ron didn’t complain, a consideration she found particularly out of character for him. She loved him, sure, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a git sometimes. This was no exception.

“Well,” he reasoned, “if you hadn’t charmed your parents so well, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

She glared out the windscreen, ignoring him for a moment. “You’ve really no idea how to locate someone through magic?”

Ron didn’t even so much as sigh. “No,” he replied lightly. “If it were possible, you would’ve discovered it when we were on the run.”

Hermione didn’t think she could argue that point and decided it was a good time to scowl some more. She hated when she got like this, but it was far less exhausting than the good cry she really wanted to have. Besides, sobbing her way across New South Wales wasn’t exactly how she wanted to spend this trip. Undoubtedly, it would be right when the desert had coated her tear-streaked face in grime that she would find her parents.

Moving slowly, as if she were a wild animal that might bite him if he didn’t, Ron reached out and placed a hand on her knee. The gesture helped her relax, although she was still certain she’d managed to fall in love with a proper git. At least he’d been willing to come along.

It wasn’t until they reached the next petrol station that he moved his hand away and Hermione took a sharp breath. “Ronald!” she exhaled, releasing the suddenly pent up air with a woosh.

The redhead glanced at her, alarmed, but pulled into the petrol station as planned when Hermione didn’t say anything more. Her eyes were moving rapidly, as if she were reading from a book no one else could see. In fact, she practically was. The research she’d done on magically placed taboos after the Battle of Hogwarts came to mind and she remembered vividly what the yellowed pages of worn tomes had said to do.

 

“Wendell Wilkins!” she was eagerly telling Ron when he’d finished paying for petrol. “I set that up as the taboo phrase while you were inside, so the next time either of them says his full name, we’ll know!”

“Yeah, or we’ll know when his boss calls him into work or when somebody says who they bumped into at the supermarket,” Ron laughed, sarcasm making him giggle as he imagined his scenario.

“Undoubtedly, apparating to the site of the taboo phrase being spoken would be problematic,” Hermione replied. “But it shouldn’t take long and it’ll give us an idea of where they are at least, which will help us narrow this all down tremendously.”

Ron was quiet and Hermione watched his thoughts play on his face. Primarily, nervousness was there.

“They’re going to love you,” Hermione told him, lowering her voice into something more soothing. “They loved your family when we met in Diagon Alley and they’ll be thrilled to know that we’re…y’know.”

Ron almost smiled. “Hermione,” he murmured, taking up a careful tone. She thought again of being a wild animal and wondered if she really seemed so likely to bite. “Why didn’t you plan for this?”

She stared at him, surprised.

“You plan for everything. You’re Plan A-Z Granger. Why didn’t you work a plan for finding your parents into your plan for getting rid of them?”

Full of awkward gestures and thoughtless comments, Ron was certainly a git. But this time, he wasn’t. That cry she’d wanted to have was suddenly happening and her chest shook as she covered her face with her hands. She wondered, for a moment, if this is what the other girls in the dorms meant when they had talked about ‘ugly crying.’ Shuddering with sobs, her body was a violent mess and her face was contorted with emotional pain as she filled her hands with salt-water and snot.

“I didn’t think I’d make it,” she whimpered, barely audible. “I really didn’t think I’d make it.”

Ron frowned. “Hermione, you’re the only reason we made it. You didn’t have confidence the whole time we were on the run? In Harry? In…me?” She shook her head and Ron had the decency not to look hurt.

“No,” she said, sniffling and regaining some measure of composure. “I didn’t think I would make it, Ron. I charmed my parents in fourth year. It’s been so long.” She broke down again and didn’t continue until she felt comfortable pulling her hands away from her face and looking Ron in the eye. “I was so sure that I’d be one of the dozens of muggleborns disappearing or dying, and I just wanted to make sure they had a good life. I didn’t think I’d need to find them.”

It was one of those odd sort of moments where the tension and nerves are high, and the next heartbeat might be silent or might pound in your ears, but sunshine and birds filled the air with a façade of cheerfulness. It was the perfect contradiction, and Ron must’ve thought the same thing.

“Hermione, that’s not like you at all,” he told her seriously.

She took another moment to pull herself together. She tucked strands of loose hair behind her ears, under the brim of her hat, and wiped her face, smearing it with dirty streaks. She blinked repeatedly until her vision was clear and took a deep breath, and then another, until she was breathing normally.

“It was a bad time,” she said simply.

Before Ron could answer properly, his mouth hanging open as he formed words, a sudden tug blossomed in their stomachs. Hermione’s eyes grew wide and Ron’s jaw dropped into an expression of shock instead. He climbed out of the Jeep first, smacking the bonnet with his wand as he walked around the front of the car to the passenger side. Hermione climbed out as he approached and he grabbed her around the waist.

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it.” She turned on the spot, pulling him with her, and tumbling into the unknown towards whomever had uttered her father’s new name. The taboo had worked.

She managed to get them somewhere isolated—not a difficult task in Australia—and they had a good view of nothingness when they landed among shrubs and dirt. The air was oppressively quiet and Wendell and Monica Wilkins looked appropriately shocked as two young adults suddenly appeared in front of them.

Wendell gasped as Ron and Hermione faced them properly, but Monica just scowled. “We were trying to get a picture with the kangaroo,” she told them seriously. “You scared it off.”

As it turned out, they were not in the middle of nothingness and the bushland ended at a rough border with a nearby town, just a short walk away. Hermione and Ron followed Hermione’s parents there after a quick wave of Hermione’s wand cleared the memory charm that had kept them from their own identities. As the false memories slipped away, replaced by the ones they’d had before, all three Grangers had burst into tears. Even had Ron looked teary-eyed for a moment before sniffling and turning his attention elsewhere.

“You’re so grown up,” Hermione’s mother murmured again and again, sipping a cup of tea in the lodgings they’d led Hermione and Ron to. “My little girl.”

There was no way to explain what had happened over the past nearly four years, and Hermione wouldn’t have wanted to. How to express the tragedy and the trauma of severe death in the wizarding community? How to express how close she’d been to death, alongside the Boy Who Lived and the man she loved? How to express the torture and devastation that had utterly ransacked her life?

“Voldemort’s gone,” she said instead. “You can come home.”

It took a long time for the conversation to move beyond these simplicities and Hermione wondered whether things would ever be the same. She had effectively cost her parents their lives in saving them, and they had little to return to in London. Dentistry jobs aren’t hard to come by but a four year employment gap after a sudden disappearance is hard to explain when you can’t actually explain it.

The three of them were sad and Hermione tried to pretend she hadn’t heard her mother say something about preferring Monica’s life to her own. She tried to ignore the way her father wouldn’t meet her eyes.

It would take a long time for their lives to move beyond this moment, but when Ron bent down on one knee, not to propose—he wasn’t that big a git—but to grab ahold of each of her parents’ hands and her own, things seemed a little better. Collecting the small family in a loving grip, he promised that everything was worth it because at the end of everything else, they still had each other. After a moment, Hermione’s father made eye contact with her. Her mother smiled softly and whispered again, “my baby girl.”

Suddenly, it didn’t seem so much like they’d landed in nothingness, but in newness, and Hermione clung desperately to that as she and Ron disapparated that afternoon, leaving her parents—whatever their names were—to decide their own future this time.


End file.
